Quote Originally Posted by Midwest Michael View Post
I really don't think step one is going to be possible, and even if it were, it just doesn't make much sense.

Gilroy to Beatty, via Yosemite is 450 miles, and none of it is freeway. In fact the vast majority is going to be curvy, 2 lane roads, including a trek across the Sierra where you are going to be stuck behind RVs and other slow moving vehicles. If you can cover the distance, I don't see any way that you'll have time to spend any time in the Yosemite Valley.
You make a valid point and we will have a rethink on this, possibly spending the night in somewhere like Independence and enter Death Valley through the West side.

With regard to our original plan, our idea was to leave Gilroy at about 6.30am and aim to get to Yosemite at around 10am. Yosemite is the one place on our trip that we've been to before so we simply planned to drive through and stop for somewhere for lunch, maybe spending up to 5 hours there, coming out the other side at around 4pm. Then we were thinking (perhaps wrongly!) that we could then travel over to Beatty by 8pm / 9pm and then have the whole day in Death Valley the following day. Are those timescales slightly optomistic?